MTA Opens Way to Eastside Digging; Valley Vote Put Off

Resolving a raucous controversy that had ravaged its credibility with the federal government and the public, the MTA cleared the way Wednesday to start digging a subway on the Eastside by hiring a business team to supervise construction.

At the same time, the county transit agency put off another hard decision on whether to abandon 3-year-old plans to build a subway across the San Fernando Valley. Although most board members have said they consider such a move inevitable, the vote effectively postponed the politically sensitive act until after the April mayoral election.

Mayor Richard Riordan stunned fellow board members last week by voting in a committee meeting to jettison the cross-Valley subway. Declaring that he still believes underground construction too expensive, the mayor nevertheless went along with the postponement Wednesday after receiving a tongue-lashing from allies in the Valley for not consulting them.

“I do not believe a subway will ever go down Burbank-Chandler [boulevards], nor do I believe it should,” Riordan said during the debate before the vote.

The decision to award the Eastside contract to a North Hollywood-based consortium called JMA ended months of wrangling that had tied the board in knots, invited harsh scrutiny from the Clinton administration and is still the subject of a criminal investigation by the agency’s inspector general.

A panel of independent experts hired for $375,000 had chosen JMA first among three bidders in August, but county transit chief Joseph E. Drew brushed aside their deliberations by recommending in October that the board choose a team the experts had ranked third.

Drew’s recommendation of Metro East Consultants, which employed several executives with campaign or former employment ties to influential MTA board member Richard Alatorre, sparked a furious protest.

The board had deadlocked on choosing between the two in previous, highly acrimonious debates that included charges of corruption. Metro East was at one point disqualified by Drew after an agency auditor said he had discovered that it made false statements in its bid.

On Wednesday, Metro East was given a one-hour hearing to clear its name--and the board rescinded the auditor’s findings after impassioned statements from the joint venture’s attorney. Metro East’s one last chance came when the mayor proposed that the decision be sent to one more panel of experts headed by a University of Alberta civil engineering professor.

But board members appeared clearly in a mood to put the divisive decision behind them, and voted 8 to 1 with nary a harsh word said. Alatorre was the lone dissenter; the mayor and one other board member abstained.

“The MTA did the right thing but only after exhausting all the alternatives,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a county supervisor and agency board member.

Said MTA board member and Gardena Councilman Jim Cragin, with noticeable relief: “Fairness prevailed.”

Alatorre was less sanguine, stating in an interview after the vote that he believed the board had erred. “I don’t think JMA is competent to do the job,” he said, alluding to the team’s supervision of troubled tunneling in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Some board members said they now feared lawsuits from the two other bidders for the $65-million contract. But George Kieffer, spokesman for Bechtel Infrastructure Corp., which was ranked second by the expert panel, said his client would not object. “Bechtel is disappointed, but pleased that the agency was able to get this behind them,” he said. Metro East officials could not be reached for comment.

Regarding the Valley line, the mayor joined with Yaroslavsky to recommend that the MTA defer action until a long-awaited environmental impact report is released in the spring. The report will compare the impacts of a variety of alternative rail technologies and routes.

“At that point we’re going to have some difficult decisions to make,” said Yaroslavsky, who has said he agrees that the agency lacks the funds to build a subway in the Valley.

Any cross-Valley rail route would hook up with the Red Line subway extension now under construction from west of downtown to North Hollywood. That extension is scheduled to start transporting commuters in 2000.

Riordan has changed his position on the east-west Valley rail line twice since his 1993 mayoral campaign, when he favored a monorail above the Ventura Freeway. Nearly unanimous support for a subway by Valley homeowner and business groups, however, helped persuade Riordan to back underground construction after taking office a year later.

After tunneling debacles and with shrinking availability of federal funds, Riordan reversed field again this year. He now says he no longer believes new subway construction is feasible in the Valley.

In its final action Wednesday, the board did, however, vote to apply to the federal government for $58 million to design a rail route across the Valley. It also accepted a commitment of $200 million in citywide subway construction funds from Los Angeles in exchange for the promise to begin designing some type of Valley route by 2000.